Marketers cut back total spending this year, but they cranked up mobile marketing budgets by 26% and expect to do the same next year, according to a new benchmarking study by the Mobile Marketing Association.
Of course, that growth is on a small base of an average 1.8% budget allocation to mobile. Nevertheless, it’s a vote of confidence in the present or future importance of mobile as a way to reach audiences and promote brands.
The U.S. Mobile Marketing Industry Study polled 195 national brands and agencies in late May, in conjunction with Chief Marketer, Advertising Database Inc. and Luth Research, to get a sense of the scope of mobile marketing activity in the U.S. today.
“It’s a fast-evolving, dynamic and exciting marketplace,” Peter Johnson, MMA vice president of market intelligence and strategy, says of this first-ever study. “We wanted to pool the collective insight of the players and compare their results.”
Half those polled said they had run at least one campaign with a mobile component during the previous year. While two-thirds of those involved text messaging, more than half (53%) involved a mobile-optimized WAP site, reflecting the growing number of users accessing the Internet directly on handsets.
What are marketers putting into those mobile campaigns? Eighty-three percent said they include alerts about specific products, sales and offers, while 42% said they deploy mobile coupons.
And although 36% of brands doing mobile marketing consider it an “experimental” tactic, a surprising 33% say they treat it as an enhancement to existing campaigns. Another 19% bake mobile in from the start. Seventy percent of marketers say they’re building mobile into their online or e-mail campaigns, and about half that report using mobile marketing at events or trade shows (36%) or in retail or point-of-purchase displays (34%).
In terms of measurements of mobile success, respondents look most often to response rates (55%) and SMS opt-ins (47%). But almost as many track Web traffic from handsets (43%) and mobile page views (41%).
That range of possible measurements makes sense, says Johnson. “Given a wealth of new mobile options, people are trying to figure out how they can use this new tool set. One size won’t fit all. Mobile isn’t TV or radio. It’s a set of sub-media, and though a tactic works for one player, another may find that something very different does better.”
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